16 FICTION

TLS SEPTEMBER 7 2018

You could sense his hand right downto the jacket copy on his books. “V. S.Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932.

He went to England on a scholarship in 1950.After four years at Oxford he began to write,and since then he has followed no other profes-sion.” Naipaul did not want anyone to mistakehim for anything other than a complete devo-tee of his art, a Brahmin of the novel. Con-tained, too, in that phrasing was the sense thatalternative fates haunted him: the washed-upwriter, the BBC script man, the book reviewer,the put-upon lawyer, the English teacher, thewaiter in a curry restaurant, the vagrant. Thecharacters in his novels often read like chuteshe could have fallen down, from Willie Cha-dran’s confused reckoning with his lack of tal-ent in Half a Life (2001) to the fumblingBombay house servant Santosh in “One Out ofMany” (part of In a Free State), whose lifeamounts to “the knowledge that I have a faceand have a body, that I must feed and clothethis body for a number of years”. In his gran-dest world-historical mode, Naipaul measuredthe tremors of individual self-consciousness in

THOMAS MEANEY

some of the more neglected humans of hiscentury. But there was never any mistakingthat the main consciousness under examina-

tion was his own. No other writer took theachievement of having a “point of view” lessfor granted, and none was so wracked with thefear of becoming a part of the flow, an unthink-ing presence, one out of many, unaware ofhimself.

Much of the commentary on his death haspuzzled over whether to pardon Naipaul his pri-vate cruelties for writing well. But whatwas the writing like? What gave it its crispartless quality, as if he rinsed and distilled hissentences a few times more than his peers?It has something to do with the extreme levelof attention that he could keep running simul-taneously on a wide array of objects, all thewhile sensing the rhythm the reader would needto absorb it. In his youth, Naipaul attackedEnglish novelists who had been to his part of theworld and not seen it clearly: Trollope, Waugh,even Conrad. He savaged Gandhi’s autobio-graphy because Gandhi never described what London looked like. For Naipaul, the corru-gated iron shack on the side of the dirt road inbetween tropical shanty towns demanded atten-tion. His novels are also full of animals and fauna and minerals – the Honduras trees, Ber-muda grass, bougainvillea, jasmine, eucalyp-tus, heliconia, eboga, tulip trees, yews, aspens,peonies, Bauxite – brought to an almost suffo-cating density in Enigma of Arrival. Here is apassage from The Mimic Men (1967), Naipaul’sseventh novel and perhaps his finest, whereRalph Singh, the disappointed postcolonial pol-itician turned aspiring memoirist, recalls his first experience of snow in England (he feelspropriety towards snow because of his fantasiesof Aryan Central Asia, which he treats as his own private mythical past):

Standing before window – crooked sashes,peeling paintwork: so fragile the structure uphere which lower down appeared so solid – Ifelt the dead light on my face. The flakes didn’tonly float: they also spun. They touched theglass and turned a film of melting ice. Below thelivid grey sky roofs were white and shiningblack in patches. The bombsite was so wholly

V. S. Naipaul, Jaipur, 2015

Believing in the record white: every shrub, every discarded bottle, box,and tin was defined. I had seen. Yet what was Ito do with so complete a beauty? And lookingout from that room to the thin lines of brownsmoke arising from ugly chimney pots, theplastered wall of the house next to the bombsitetremendously braced and buttressed lookingout from that empty room with the mattress onthe floor, I felt all the magic of the city go away,and had an intimation of the forlornness of thecity and of the people who lived in it.

This kind of noticing, weaving difficult emo-tions with the world outside, makes up some ofNaipaul’s finest passages. It is not only the shabbiness of things that confounds Singh, butthe way he feels that beauty, too, is inaccessibleto him. Part of the effect owes to Naipaul’s con-fidence – so unfashionable and untenable – thatit is possible to describe things as they actuallyare, to reach a level of perception where the sub-jective meets the objective, and reality has beenreproduced on the page. Few writers think likethis, but Naipaul’s fallacy produced prose whose suppleness was in inverse proportion tothe brittle conviction that sustained it. He was probably being truthful when he said Americanmovies influenced his writing more than English literature: the camera-like handling, theclipped dialogue. Naipaul’s distinctiveness showed up in smaller moments, too, as in Guer-rillas (1975) when Naipaul describes the SouthAfrican Roche’s trousers as “fawn-coloured”, and then, a page later, describes a “dog” as“fawn-coloured”. It’s not merely that he despised elegant variation; he needed repeti-tion, which registered right down to the “bis” inhis own speech (“It was very difficult, it was very difficult”). When Naipaul had found the right word, he used it over and over. There werecertain words he disliked (“plethora”) and cer-tain words he favoured: “bush”, “tribal”, “latrine”.

In an extraordinary act, Naipaul gave him-self over to his biographer like a patient givinghis body over to science: no restrictions wereput on Patrick French’s scalpel. “I am a greatbeliever in the record”, Naipaul told French,whose biography The World Is What It Isappeared in 2008, “that the truth is wonderfuland that any doctored truth is awful”.

The story that came through there wasnot quite what Naipaul had always led us tobelieve. The experience of arriving fromthe periphery to what he took to be the heartof civilization was one of his obsessive,recurring themes. But in French’s account, theyoung Naipaul was likely more heavily armedthan he would later make himself out: a humanhusk without a point of view. Growing upin a crowded household and schooled in theTrinidadian art of pecong, a vicious style ofduelling wit, Naipaul came to Oxford asready to lunge as he was to parry. Whenhe saw writers he admired pass through thecollege gates, “magical men” such as JoyceCary, he wanted to become them. His laterwriting about some of his friends who easedhis way into London society – AnthonyPowell, above all – took on a vindictive quality(Naipaul proudly claimed never to have readany of Powell’s books when they were friends)that suggested some of his abundant disdainwas his way of making it as an emigrant pio-neer. He converted his precocity into hauteur.“That clever little nigger Naipaul has wonanother literary prize” (Evelyn Waugh, 1963)was the kind of thing he had to put up withbehind his back.

A reflection on the life and work of V. S. Naipaul

FICTION 17

TLS SEPTEMBER 7 2018

At first Naipaul did not realize that what hehad left behind would become his great subject.He was afraid of having used up all his materialin A House for Mr Biswas, but discovered itcould not be exhausted. His non-fiction espe-cially would expand on the presencesand incipient dramas in the old Port of Spain schoolroom: Africa, South America, America,India, colonialism, Black Power and Islam. Inhis early writing, Naipaul was almost an anti-colonial avenger. Though he kept his distance from the great generation of Caribbean radicals– Stuart Hall, Derek Walcott, Samuel Selvon –he, perhaps more than them, succeeded in con-ferring dignity on characters that had only everbeen caricatures in most British fiction.

But his non-fiction was different altogether.Though his writing on the period of decoloniza-tion is sometimes described as “searing” and“unsparing”, his overall depiction of the 1960sand 70s was distorted. In his eyes, the rise ofthe new states, full of incompetent bureaucratsaping their past masters in their offices andclubs, was an unending farce. Naipaul madethings too easy for himself: he wroteonly of the buffoons and murderous jesters– Cheddi Chagan, Michael X, Mobutu – insteadof reckoning with harder figures: Frantz Fanon,Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor. It was as ifsomeone were to write about internationalsocialism through the careers of Enver Hoxha,Siad Barre and Slobodan Milošević. “There isan instructively photogenic touch to Naipaul’sitineraries”, Benedict Anderson once observed.“Buenos Aires (not Caracas), Kinshasa (notMaputo), Kuala Lumpur (not Algiers) show insharp, dyspeptic relief the civilized clubmanagainst a backdrop of ‘Oriental’ savagery, self-delusion, fanaticism and stupidity . . . . Who willbuy Naipaul on Belgium or Bulgaria?”

Likewise, Naipaul on Islam was often acrude retailing of colonial historiography:blaming twelfth-century Muslim conquestsfor the state of India’s contemporary distress,or finding Malaysians and Indonesians incapa-ble of appreciating their own past due to theirlong-distance fealty to Mecca. He was not avery good traveller: the endless fussiness withguides and fixers and meals could become tire-some to read about (though it’s difficult not toagree with his discovery that it is easier to writein sterile international hotels than in ones thataim for authenticity). By his middle period,as Anderson noted, Naipaul was proclaimingloudly what many polite English people wouldno longer say in public. As the end of theCold War came, and Islam was substituted forcommunism as the main enemy of the West,his writings became a safe pond where neo-conservatives went fishing for justificationsfor their own imposed revolutions. Not thatNaipaul had much truck with the beneficenceof US power. “The Americans shoot every-body”, says Harry da Tunja in Guerrillas.“They’re worse than the South Americans.”

Naipaul’s readers fall in several categories.At the extremes, there are those who view himas a sell-out, “who allowed himself quite self-consciously to be turned into a witness for theWestern prosecution” (Edward Said), and thosewho embrace him with abandon. The old Left ofNew York mostly took a middle path. In the Upper West Side of Manhattan, sometime in themid-2000s, I remember a woman in a wheel-chair spying a copy of the The Mimic Men in myhands. She smiled and said with a lilt: “Isn’t hevery fine?” It was Elizabeth Hardwick in her dotage. Her apartment on West 67th Street had

been Naipaul’s base of operations on his visitsto New York; there he may have written some ofhis piece on Norman Mailer’s campaign for mayor (“New York in parts is like Delhi withmoney”). Hardwick, Irving Howe, Vivian Gor-nick, Michael Greenberg and other New Yorkwriters found striking resonances of their ownpolitical itineraries in Naipaul’s visions – as well as the same distaste for the aesthetization of poverty and despair by a younger generationof liberals. But as much as they used his booksas their own travel guides, and judged his writ-ing unsurpassed, their admiration had a limit.“A serious writer”, Howe wrote of Naipaul, “can simply allow the wretchedness of his depicted scene to become the limit of his vision.”

Afew years later, I saw Naipaul as heexited the 92nd Street Y. There hadbeen an event for The Masque of Africa.

He was bent over, teetering on dropsical legs, telling a fan who helped him walk that Americawas more receptive to him this time around. (The nadir may have been 1979, when Naipaulspent a year teaching creative writing at Wes-leyan University, where he would read Balzac,silently to himself in front of his “bogusstudents”, and savoured their hatred of him.) Hemoved past the crowd; past the taxi drivers; pastthe doormen and hot dog vendors. I wanted

to believe he was taking them all in with quicksaccades, candidates for a place in his fiction ifthey stayed in his memory: another escaped fatethere, another one there. The colour and shapeof some of the men was not that different fromhis. The opening of A Bend in the River is nowtaken as Naipaul’s credo, plucked by Obamafor a drone-friendly foreign policy slogan, andlikely to survive longer than his other sentences.“The world is what it is; men who are nothing,who allow themselves to become nothing, haveno place in it.” But the line is spoken by Salim,an insecure shop owner, who is taking measureof his fate against the backdrop of dictatorial Africa. It is the voice of a small man reachingfor exaggerated clarity, as he acts as his owndubious life coach. It is not a line from Naip-aul’s personal diary or a letter from son to father.

Naipaul worked in more forms than mostof his peers: only poetry he never seems tohave tried (“Most people called poets aretiny people, with tiny thoughts”). Picaresque novels, political novels, short stories, travelreports, memoirs, auto-fiction (The Enigma ofArrival), literary appraisals of past masters,and magazine profiles (his piece on Jacques Soustelle is the pinnacle of the form): he mas-tered them all. Naipaul’s forays into the social psychology of elections – from Indira Gandhi’s,to the slim marvel The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), to his report from the 1984 Republican

Convention in Dallas – shames much of what passes for political science. There was some-thing caustic yet also gentle about these pieces,as if he could not help seeing the ritual of repre-sentation for what it was – elites performingtheir responsibility to the people – but that it wasin the end a necessary fiction, and that the luckyyet vulnerable conceit of democracy may be that it allows its pageantry to be enacted again and again.

As central as anything to Naipaul’s novelswas sex, which tended to be clumsy, brutal andshort. The scenes are hard to forget. Jane, theprivileged, wide-eyed publicist in Guerrillas,on the bed after a rape, “her untanned buttockstogether spreading slightly, wet with sweatwhere he had been sitting on her, the fine hairsthere flatted in the sweat and showing moreclearly”. The fear of Santosh in In a Free Statebefore he sleeps with a black woman in hismaster’s apartment in Washington, DC. “Thehubshi woman came in, moving among myemployer’s ornaments like a bull. I was greatlyprovoked. The smell was too much; so wasthe sight of her armpits. I fell. She dragged medown on the couch, on the saffron spread whichwas one of my employer’s nicest pieces ofPunjabi folk-weaving.” And Willie Chan-dran’s blind man’s bluff: “June undressedmethodically. It was too much for Willie. Hehardly enjoyed the moment. In no time at all itwas over for him, after a whole weekend ofplanning. After all the expense, and he didn’tknow what to say”. Naipaul always presumedthat the damaged society a person belonged towould be exposed in the physical act. Amongthe ravages of colonialism, he was preoccupiedwith one element less talked about: the corrup-tion and mimicry of passions whose genericshape was dictated by the self-proclaimedhigher civilization.

Naipaul’s last novel Magic Seeds (2004)showed clear signs of slipping off. It was as if ithad been conceived and written by someone attempting to lampoon his style and his obses-sions. The funniest and saddest thing written onNaipaul may be a short story by Roberto Bolaño, “Scholars of Sodom”. The narrator tries to write a story about Naipaul in the 1980s,as he hovers around the streets of Buenos Aireson assignment for the New York Review of Books:

That’s how Naipaul was in my story, in spite ofhimself. He kept his eyes open and maintainedhis customary lucidity. He had what the Spanishcall bad milk, a kind of spleen that immunizedhim against appeals to vulgar sentimentality.But in his nights of wandering around BuenosAires, he, or his antennae, also picked up thestatic of hell. The problem was that he didn’tknow how to extract the messages from thatnoise, a predicament that certain writers, certainliterary artists, find particularly unsettling.

As writer’s criticism, this was the sort ofthing that Naipaul could just about take. Forall his investigations and meditations on whyhe had become a writer, the fact remainedpreciously mysterious to him. That insolubleblot of the unknown within himself granted himstrong negative capability. Naipaul had thin enough skin to let the pain of the world in, but atough enough hide to write some of it back out.Despite his distortions, his failings, and every-thing else, the sympathies he managed at his height were vast. You could say he died from self-parody. You could say that. But he will stillbe read by those who remember – or discover –the rest.

‘Grounded’ by Ella Baron

“In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; butwhat it really meant was that they no longer believed.” (J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan)